What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Joined PNC3. Joined Stamp Collecting Blog. Printed out the The Machin Nut Basic Album pages and had a cracking time putting stamps into it.

I redid my xls file for my Straits Settlements / Malayia to organize by SG number. The harder task is correlating to Scott Number.

I added a page from my Malaya on Steiner pages.

I just purchased a Palo hingeless Canada album. Going to branch out from The United States, Italy, and Israel.

Thanks :)


As for me... Spend most of the day outside with kids sleighing . I managed to sneak some stamps in between and worked a small group of US stamps. Managed to add about four dozen new stamps to my collection.

-k-

I visited a traditional stamp store (for the first time since I began collecting again.) Had to drive 40 miles to do so. Found a set of the Lester Brookman books - The United States Postage Stamps of the 19th Century to add to my library.

I finished rearranging my New Jersy precancels to make room for nearly 100 new additions of local types. The beauty of Vario pages allows the insertion of a new page where needed to easily space out room for additions and still maintain alphabetical order of towns.

I'm in the midst of trying to identify and organize a mass of miscellaneous used recent Japanese issues, mostly those issued in souvenir sheets over the last 10 years or so. I (mostly) use Steiner for Japan through about 2005, but I had been throwing recent issues into a stockbook in bits and pieces. I decided to actually organize them by the set they belong to and transfer them to Vario pages, labeling them in the process. Oy. It has been an exercise in patience, and finding just the correct flower stamp (or landscape stamp or art stamp, etc) in Scott using the tiny illustrations they use for souvenir sheets is trying. It is about enough to make me pound my head on my desk at times. It's the only situation I can recall where I spend more time looking at the catalog with a magnifying glass than the stamps.

I went to a good stamp club where I could learn about stamps, interact with fellow collectors, look at stamps other members were offering for sale, and do it without having to drive. It was today and it was here at SCF.

I've been working on plating Danish bicoloured issues, sorting Denmark and Sweden stamps, making album pages and wishing I had more time and money to do even more.

I have rediscovered my Deutsches Reich collection which I put together 25 years ago. I now look at the 1923 rossettenmuster issue and realize that I made a bit of a mess of it back then. So I am going to sort this out, it will take some time and reorganizing, but I will get there(i hope).

A few of the unorganized pages with Plattendruck, walzendruck, plate flaw sprung perfins etc etc. As I said a bit of a mess.

Yesterday, I went to a small village in County Donegal to buy the annual St Patricks Day stamps. Had an interesting conversation with the clerks. Mail is actually taken several miles away to Athlone to be processed. Kindly they postmarked a couple of stamps and handed them back to me. I sent some others thru the post.
Interestingly they are still using the Definitives (Easter Rising) ...SOAR stamps...that were issued last year. The "new" definitives which were made available in the Philatelic Bureau last month are not yet distributed.
(As an aside, the stamps available in the Philatelic Bureau are usually a strip numbered 1-8 (depending on the number in the set) but the stamps available in January in the Philatelic Bureau were actually numbered 1-600 and from a roll intended for a machine in a "normal" Counter at the General Post Office.
The ladies in the village post office have not been given a date when they will receive the new stamps...presumably when Easter Rising stamps are all used up.
Schoolboy error....I placed some mint St Patricks Day stamps in my wallet....and got caught in a heavy shower of rain. Damaged the stamps too much to be in my album....but I can use them as postage.

I am cross referencing Malaya stamps between Scott and Stanley Gibbons. I picked up a Scott Classic and was no real use compared to the regular Scott book. What I have is mounted on Steiner pages so in Scott order.

Of course, Scott uses different colors than Gibbons and organizes them differently (SG seems more logical). SG has a number of more varieties too.

This is going to take a while to go through all Malay states. This differences primarily for issues prior to 1930 or so. After that, easy to map.

Continuing to work on laying out page schemes for my Algeria collection (see my post on 6 Feb in this thread for more details). Have reached the end of 1991, which is page 75 for Algeria (actually page 39 for volume 2 of Algeria, as I am parcing nations into smaller volumes since the layout inserts take up space, volume I (37 pages) covers French Algeria to the last issues of 1958, Volume II (39 pages plus 4 pages for souvenir sheets) covers the period 1962-1991 during the rise and decline of the one party state under the FLN). Debating whether to complete Algeria layouts to the present, though I don't have any stamps yet for post-1991, or if I should go to another nation and set it up to cover the stamps I do have and then return to do "newer issues" at a later date. Decisions...decisions...

Going on year two of organizing and mounting all the lots I purchased from the JAMES CZYL estate thru Regency Auctions . A lot of work just trying to put order to his stuff ,so I can mount it . I now have 16 binders of mounted Steiner pages and hope to have about 25 when I am done .
I didn't want to mount stuff without some kind of explanation written on each page .So research time keeps this as a slow process , also with mounting and explaining forgeries always looking for the real stamp to mount next to the forgery ,so quality of the real stamp is not required .